Today i was working on making deformations of a cartoony type of character and i was thinking about whether a tool would make it helpful to quickly preview the deformations after their created. I imagine it also may be able to be used during skinning.
Basically the idea is to occupy just a certain range of timeline like say frames 5-20 to do some automatic rotation keying of joints.
I haven't written the tool yet as i will wait until it becomes necessary but here are the basic ideas, probably later they would get changed.
Here's what i jotted down:
(leg, frames 5-20, 3 times mirror behavior, attribute is rotate z, value is 90, list all bound joints)
---should set keys at 5 and 20 at default, all rotate's (not just z) 0
---should remove all keys between 6 and 19 for all rotates
---should set key at 90 and -90 on leg joint at (8, 11, 14) round (20-5)/(3+1) = 3. 5+1*3 and 5+2*3 5+3*3 (This trying to figure out where
to set keys if we just want to use a certain frame range in timeline… this way cans say shoulder test animation take up frames (120-250), hand (20,50)...
and here are a couple pictures of trying to work out a shoulder deformation of a cartoony character. I'm thinking i may use an all joint solution for the shoulder. To get this rough look would require me to drive the clavicle translation from its rotation. I think i'll add a joint so on the down the top of shoulder pokes out more.
cheers,
Nate
Inspired by Michael Comet (comet-cartoons dot com) check out his amazing joint orient tool it was incredibly easy and fast to use for orienting joints
